Music

Rolling Stone puts unreleased covers album in year-end top 10

by Luke Ottenhof

If you’ve got a finger anywhere even near the pulse of music journalism in 2016, you’re aware Rolling Stone isn’t the bastion for cutting-edge music criticism and coverage it used to be (if it indeed used to be that). Gone are Lester Bangs’ cough-syrup-fuelled Tangerine Dream rantings and acerbic, aggressive interviews, replaced with milquetoast remarks and unavoidable, lukewarm three-and-a-half-star reviews. But now the publication has really gone above and beyond to show they don’t really give a shit about new music, by placing a COVERS ALBUM in their top 10 best records of 2016.

But wait! It gets better: it hasn’t even been released yet.

English blues-rock immortals The Rolling Stones are releasing Blue and Lonesome, their first studio album in over a decade, on December 2, but don’t get too excited; it contains no original material, consisting instead of covers of their favourite blues-rock songs. That kind of complacency is truly amusing, but somehow, it’s landed them the title of seventh-best record of 2016 over at Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Albums of 2016 before the record’s even hit shelves.

Even the accompanying blurb is comically transparent: praising the album as “effortless” and bearing a “laid-back intensity,” it unintentionally highlights the same characteristics in placing an unreleased covers album ANYWHERE on a year-end list, let alone at number SEVEN.

“By going back to their roots, the Stones found a way to grow up,” reads the entry. They’ve been a band for 53 fuckin’ years. It’s a modern miracle that Keith Richards’ leathery body is still pumping blood. How could they POSSIBLY be growing up?

The album of decades-old blues covers charts ahead of Solange’s critically-acclaimed A Seat At The Table, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ devastating Skeleton Tree, and it edges out Kanye’s The Life of Pablo by one spot. Not to mention that A Tribe Called Quest’s earth-rattling We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service clocks in a handsome 23 spots lower.

A fine record of enjoyable blues renditions? Maybe. We’ve got to wait a few more days before making that call. But calling it the seventh-best record of 2016 in a year brimming with beautiful new records from all corners of the industry? Shaking our damn heads.